Bedsore - Dreaming The Strife For Love Review - Last Rites (2024)

Spencer Hotz on November 11, 2024

[Cover art by Denis Forkas Kostromitin]

Bands often telegraph when significant shifts in their sound are imminent. No one who truly paid attention toGhost Reveries andWatershed was particularly shocked by the full dive into 70’s prog that Opeth would take withHeritage. Folks listening toHidden History Of The Human RaceandTimewave Zeroweren’t only not surprised by Blood Incantation merging their prog and death metal influences into lengthy tracks, they were actively hoping for it. The substantial amount of classic prog in Bedsore’s sophomore album, however, is a rather wild departure from debut Hypnagogic Hallucinations. Sure, that album is absolutely a progressive death metal album, but more so in the way of having open-space passages that create a dark atmosphere and some noodly parts rather than knocking the listener over the head with Hammond organs. The synths used on “Cauliflower Growth” simply gave the doomy proceedings a greater ominous tone. The biggest hint was the opening track, which the band directly labeled as an intro. Such songs are often considered outliers to set a tone rather than a harbinger of what’s to come for future releases. The 16-minute beast Bedsore contributed to their split with Mortal Incarnation certainly gets closer with a bopping opening and a brief synth part that sounds like an evil seventh-inning stretch, but most of its proggy bits land more in the Dødheimsgard book of space weirdness, while the rest of the song spends the majority of its time in more aggressive metal territory. Much like intro tracks, splits and EPs are often used to let bands stretch their wings a bit and aren’t reliable signals for where a band intends to go. Dreaming the Strife for Loveis such barrel roll into capital P Prog that another of our LR writers rightfully posed the following question, “Would we even consider this a metal album if it weren’t for the vocals?” I say yes, but arguing about whether this should be considered a Heavy Prog album or a Heavy Metal album is sort of splitting hairs.

Release date: November 29, 2024. Label: 20 Buck Spin.

Naturally, now that it has been mentioned, nothing in the opening six minutes that make up “Minerva’s Obelisque” is going to convince you this isn’t a straight-up Prog album. The track is immediately lighter than anything else by Bedsore, but the organ, slow-building rolls of the drums and the well-timed hefty hits come across like Phil Collins just pissed off everyone in Genesis right before they hit record. The song has spacey passages, meandering bass notes, flute, haunted clean vocals and trumpet. While it all screams forward from a portal to several decades ago, the album does put a dark sheen on everything, like a version of modern Opeth from The Upside Down with an edge from Horrendous’ Ecdysis. The intro to “Scars of Light” feels like a nod to Sorceress. When the first real riff of the album kicks in, it’s absolutely killer and backed by thundering, pulsing drums. The tone of the fretless bass and the drum work by Davide Itri are significant parts of what help this album stay anchored by a toe in the heavy metal realm. The keys and organ during certain stretches of “Scars of Light” give it a nice spooky vibe, too.

The 11-minute centerpiece that is “A Colossus, an Elephant, a Winged Horse; the Dragon Rendezvous” (yes, I know that sounds like the start of a bad pun joke) does an exceptional job of seamlessly integrating all of Bedsore’s influences. The rumbling, dark intro uses some big drum hits that give it a timpani bombast before the synths and keys come in to give the song an air of symphonic black metal that includes a mini guitar lead emitting wistful tones in the night. There are stretches where the song shreds tremolo guitar lines and blasts the drums apart while still managing to make a transition into a John Carpenter-style synth section, which somehow manages to seem natural. It even has a funky prog passage reminiscent of “Lotus Eater.” The metal and prog nerd elements that seem so disparate are so effectively fused here that nothing seems out of place or awkward. Similarly, lead single “Realm of Eleuterillide” offers another twist as it gets downright jazzy around the two-minute mark but props that against a big burly section that sounds like it should back the climbing of a massive demon out of a hole to hell. The most “fun” track comes late on the album in the form of the relatively brief “Fanfare for a Heartfelt Love,” which starts with big organ notes that could soundtrack a Castlevania game before the synths kick in, and all of a sudden, you feel more like watching Flash Gordon.

Ultimately, another band fusing death metal and 70’s prog is going to see Dreaming the Strife for Love end up being compared to Absolute Elsewhere. Both are excellent but take a very different approach to bringing these styles together. Blood Incantation more directly nods at their progressive influences while sectioning out the different styles. Their songs more often follow the pattern of ‘here’s the Hällas part’, ‘here’s the death metal part’, ‘here’s the Pink Floyd part’, and so on and so forth. Bedsore has added their fingerprints to the styles of their heroes, creating an interpretation that feels more their own while readily intermingling all the elements of their songs so that the death metal parts might still be fused with the prog bits. The saxophone can sit behind the guitars for a stretch before blasting to the forefront for a brief second. The organs can support the drums to make their blasts hit harder. The bass can keep the keyboards still feeling heavy.

Recommending this album is sort of an odd endeavor with that in mind. If you dig the newest Blood Incantation, there’s no reason not to give this a shot. On the other hand, if the lack of flow in the new Blood Incantation turned you away, you should also give this a shot, as it provides a remedy to that woe. If you’re simply a prog nerd who also enjoys metal, this should absolutely be on your list to check out. Oddly enough, the trickiest recommendation is telling fans of Bedsore’s debut to listen to this. If you’re a fan of a band, you should always listen to their newest output, but this one is so different that it won’t at all be surprising if a portion of their followers jump ship. Hopefully, though, enough prog dorks like me will get their ears on it and more than makeup for those not interested in the path of the nerd.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering what level of Prog Nerd we’re talking about, this is the current band photo: